Meet Dr. Margaret Burnett, a Professor of Computer Science at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. She is exploring hypotheses correlating and differentiating (or unifying) both the design and usage patterns of
software by gender. Dr. Burnett has spent the last three months as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. Great fodder for the latest edition of WM_IN, we thought, and we were lucky enough to catch up with Dr. Burnett during her last week at MSR to
talk about her focus of study, which is the fascinating topic of gender differences and human-computer interaction that exist in the ways people solve problems when they use software.
Dr. Burnett's current
research focuses on end-user programming, end-user software engineering, information foraging theory as applied to programming, and gender issues in those contexts. She is also the principal architect of the
Forms/3 and the
FAR visual programming languages, plus the
WYSIWYT testing methodology for end-user programmers. Watch, learn and enjoy!
